Medexprim’s Radiomics Enabler®, meant to unleash the potential of medical images archives for research, is now released as open source software under a GNU Affero General Public License v3 (AGPLv3).

Quantitative medical imaging biomarkers discovery (radiomics) and cognitive imaging analytics are transforming radiology. These developments require that researchers access large amounts of imaging data, sufficient in quality, quantity and diversity. These data exist and are stored by hospitals in clinical PACS (Picture Archiving and Communication System). However, the exploitation of this treasure of resources is hampered by the tedious task of selecting, extracting and de-identifying relevant image sequences.

Medexprim’s Radiomics Enabler® is an ETL (Extract-Transform-Load) for medical imaging. It automates the qualification and extraction of relevant imaging sequences from any PACS, for secondary use in research. The solution can be integrated within a Clinical Data Warehouse (CDW) to create unified and harmonized patient cohorts, with a complete access to their clinical and imaging data. Instead of spending months in manual/ low value tasks extracting and preparing data, researchers can focus on their key expertise in data science and medicine.

Medexprim chose to distribute its software as open-source, in order to foster a fast adoption by the imaging community at large, and specifically by research groups working on radiomics or developing AI algorithms. The ultimate goal is to optimize translational research and accelerate access to personalized medicine for all patients. This move adds to the range of open source solutions available for research in biomedical imaging, among which RSNA’s Clinical Trials Processor (CTP) or XNAT, for which Medexprim also provides commercial support.

Medexprim (http://www.medexprim.com) is a French startup created at the end of 2015, with the mission to facilitate the exploitation of biomedical image archives for research. With its solution Radiomics Enabler®, Medexprim won the 2016 President’s Startup Challenge from the Pistoia Alliance, a not-for-profit alliance of life science companies, vendors, publishers, and academics that work together to lower barriers to innovation in R&D. Positioned as a service provider to the research community, both private and public, Medexprim’s business proposition is to offer and / or organize deployment and support services around its solutions, combined with other open source or commercially available solutions such as a clinical data warehouse (e.g. I2B2 or ConSoRe) or a research PACS (e.g. XNAT, ArchiMed).